Overview
Pete, I wrote up some new rules for your game. My goal was to simplify things, while increasing flexibility and playability. Players should be doing less work while not losing any functionality. Here’s an overview of the biggest changes I made: Wits was too overused, having more uses than dynamism and will combined. I changed dynamism to intuition and gave it some of wits’ trappings. Changed the character build system. You had too many things that were dependent on getting your attributes to certain arbitrary limits, where if a player had to go back and change one attribute slightly he ended up changing your special abilities, available skills, and a bunch of other things. It was a complication without a need. Changed the racial benefits so that if a race is better in an attribute, it costs less to raise it to a certain level, but if the race is worse at an attribute it costs more to raise it to that level. This is expressed as a +1 or -1. I may change this to be a bit simpler. I need to sleep on the idea. Instead of taking your attribute and rolling a d20 to determine whether to leave it the same or add or subtract a point or two, I just have you roll 1d6 and add it to the total. The d20 method granted a range of 5 for possible outcomes. The d6 outcome has a range of 6, adding in slightly more chance, while making things much simpler. It also raises the tension, because it seems to grant fewer automatic successes because players always roll, and yet mechanically it’s almost identical. I was going to say that in combat, when you beat an opponent’s defense roll, you rolled a number of d10’s equal to the difference, and take the highest, and do that much damage plus your base damage minus their armor. And I can change the rules to say that. But I thought it would be quicker and cleaner to have you do your roll minus their roll in damage, plus your base damage minus their armor. Changed social conflict to dealing damage to stamina due to mental exhaustion if the target doesn’t do what the person was pressuring him into doing. Provides an incentive to give into a social skill, but not force. I don’t know how consequences work, but I tried to add a simple system for them. Gives some results beween “1 hit point left” and “completely dead.” This means that the fight can have varying degrees of danger between no lasting effects and completely dead. This is realistic and adds tension. Changed the way magic works to parallel physical skills as much as possible for balance and simplicity. Mind-controlling spells mirror social attacks, forcing the target to either comply with the spell’s command or lose stamina. Lydiskan mages are now incredibly simple to run. I’m thinking of combining skills to be about twice as broad as they are now. Right now your combat skills are too valuable. If you want to disarm someone with your sword, kill them with your sword, cut something apart with a sword, and so on you only need to invest in the sword skill. If you want to make jewelry you need a skill for cutting gems, a skill for dealing with the metals, and possibly another skill for the engraving. I’m thinking each weapon type has a unique advantage, and there’s a reason you’d take multiple weapon skills. I’d try to combine the less useful skills into broader more useful skills, like a single skill for jewelry crafting. And the unarmed skill category will all be rolled into a single skill, because it should be light on damage but broad in use. There’s currently separate skills for striking someone with your hands, your knees, and your elbows. I think that’s a bit too specific. Less specific skills require less bookkeeping and less space on your sheet.